I recently upgraded my rig to an Intel Q6600 from a P4 3.0.
It's awesome.
I'm running the q6600 on an Asus Commando motherboard.
I got the Commando because of my legacy PCI hardware: EMU 1820M, 2 UAD PCI and 1 Poco PCI.
The Commando is one of the few boards with 4 PCI slots.
The upgrade was easy. I just swapped out the boards and and had the new driver CD ready. Because the previous board was a 865 based chipset and the Commando is a 965 based chipset the swap upgrade was very smooth.

What do you get with a Q6600? VSTi's for days and days. Have fun trying to max your CPU out. I haven't been able to yet.
I run Cubase Studio 4.1.1 and Live 6 and 7. I also use the Komplete 5 and Kore 2.
Everything works great ... well you know, as great as software can work :wink:

Btw some people may be scratching their heads about my upgrade. "you mean you didn't backup, wipe your drives and reinstall everything from scratch???" That's right I did not. :D

I always do this first, if my system works then I keep it. Please let it be known that I keep daily,weekly,monthly backups so my fear factor is zero.
Also my day job is a computer tech. so again my tech worries are few.
If you've ever had to reinstall Komplete 4 then upgrade to Komplete 5 then ... not to mention the Live 7 Suite install then you'll know why I go for the "plug and pray" before the "wipe and loose a day".

Get a Quad Core! If you use VSTi's then it is a no brainer. IT will save you time and let you stop freezing tracks. Massive in HQ mode? no problem.

Now my only problem is my P4 D 3.2 that sits next to the Quad is getting jealous. I've tried to explain to my P4 D that she is for email, web and games but she ain't having it.

Sounds like a nice upgrade.
However I must ask, what information do you have regarding optimization with your VST's and quad-cores?
How do you know they aren't all running on 1 core?
I will contact NI to confirm that the CPU load is distributed etc.
Anyway, nice system and keep us posted!
Thanks

Daws at low latency with multi-processor/core machines still struggle.

Cubase 4 is a great example of a poorly written multi-processor audio engine I get better performance by turning multi-processor support off on my MacPro!

Logic fairs a bit better but on my 2 processor 4 core Mac pro still pegs out at around 250% using a 256 buffer.

Quad core chips may perform slightly better than this as the secondary cache is shareable by all four cores.

Don't get me wrong I am all for multi-processor core machines (My main work machine has 48 processors) but actual performance for each vst will probably be slightly worse, so running massive in HQ mode may actually perform worse on a multi-core machine.

The machine is the central server for a Digital Production system for Denmark Radio (www.dr.dk) who are the Danish national broadcaster.

All new Radio and TV productions that DR create are done using this system. along with many other machines for transcoding, editing stations, transmission servers, Ingest stations etc. All these other machines use this central server as glue and storage via xml based calls to multi process piece of software called the BIS, this handles around 500,000 to 2,000,000 transactions a day.

It also has 2PB of offline storage using tape robots to store off-lined hires media, this media can be got at in around 1 minute after a request is made. It has around 70TB of nearline storage, media is automatically offlined if it is not used for a while using DMF. Lowres versions of all media are always stored on nearline storage for instant viewing and edits can be done against this material and then the machine will conform the edits useing the hires material.

The system has a major advantage of working in a "TailMode" way, you can start ingesting video from a camera into the system and edit it as it is ingesting and then transmit the finished clip while the original is still being ingested.

There is also another machine with the same specs for failover, and two more slight lower spec machines for testing and development.

I'm one of the Guys that has developed the system which has taken six years so far with maybe 1 to 2 years left till it is fully finished.

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